


just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you

by singalellaby



Category: Grey's Anatomy
Genre: F/M, still not over the plane crash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-30
Updated: 2013-03-30
Packaged: 2017-12-07 00:26:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/741956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singalellaby/pseuds/singalellaby
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mark isn't used to the idea that he can make people stronger just by being there for them, but if this is what it's like, if this is what love can do for people...well, there's not a burning bridge in sight. Just his and Lexie's, twinned, meeting in the middle.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just ghosts that broke my heart before I met you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [magisterequitum](https://archiveofourown.org/users/magisterequitum/gifts).



> Written for the "great writers steal" ficathon on LJ, for the prompt "Grey's Anatomy + Mark/Lexie + Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us."

"Teach me," she says to him and she's all too small bones and too large brains and too few handfuls of years to her names. 

"Teach me," she says to him and she's like Lolita in scrubs because she's just a particularly baby-faced intern, except she isn't in scrubs and now she isn't even in _clothes_. 

"Teach me", she says to him and yet, in this at least, she needs no teaching. 

She is pliant and she is enthusiastic and she's totally, wholly invested in the heat of it all, right up until the moment she gasps and clenches and a drop of her sweat falls from her throat to his brow. It's like a benediction, a baptism, and yet as Mark groans his release into a pair of breasts he'd never _want_ his art to touch, it's nothing like salvation at all when he thinks about it. Because this is Meredith Grey's sister, the _second_ Grey that Derek has warned him away from, and Mark has ruined that friendship too many times to want to do it again.

She is temptation and she is forbidden fruit and she is the burning brand he could use to set his last bridge alight. She is the _worst_ idea he has ever had, and that includes sleeping with Addison.

...But it's not just her body, it's her clear-eyed brilliance, the trust in her eyes, the way he looks at her and _doesn't_ see the trail of fuck-ups and mistakes that have led him to where he is now. He wants Lexie Grey, he realises, because she could be as much of a fresh start as a crash and burn.

(Not that sneaking in and out of attic rooms isn't also crazy hot in a throwback to his college days as well, but that's not the point. Or maybe it is. If she's salvation and sin all at once, then it makes sense that not all of his bad habits are going to die at once.)

 

 

He lets Derek punch him. Again. So apparently that's now their thing where Grey women are concerned.

But the point is that Mark _tells_ him about Lexie and, even with the punching, even with him wondering whether this is definitely, absolutely, for sure the last straw in the Shepherd/Sloan friendship...well, there's creation here as well as destruction. He feels the foundation being laid down, like debriding the wound before you start attaching the graft, and it's not that he doesn't have regrets about how this went down, but the look in Lexie's eyes - half surprise, half wonder, half something he's seen a hundred times before in women's faces, but that he's never felt an echo of behind his own bruises - definitely isn't one of them.

 

 

Horribly (and it really is, horrible that is, he can't believe he's even considering this) Mark would rather be back in that bed with his broken penis and Lexie torn between mortification and hysteria than right here, right now. The dull crying, just a shaking of her torso because it's as if all the saline in her body has been spent weeping over the ruined shell that was once George O'Malley, he's seen it in patients before. They have protocol and procedure for that at the hospital, a three step programme that they make you do roleplays of in medical school wherein Addison had excelled and Derek had frozen his first attempt and Mark had winked at the actress playing the patient he was meant to be telling she was going to lose her leg and then not got very good results, though he'd always said that he was pretty enough to make anyone feel comforted.

There are no roleplays for this.

Lexie is grieving in a deeply visceral way, like her sadness is an illness turning malignant at her core, and Mark feels helpless because he hadn't even liked the whiny resident. It makes any platitudes feel false and the thing with Lexie, what's _different_ about her is how she's always made him want to be genuinely himself around her even while he simultaneously wants to be a _better_ version of that for her.

So Mark can't talk to her about O'Malley because he hadn't fucking _cared_ about O'Malley, and Lexie knows that. But he takes his place and makes it theirs and he holds her while she cries without tears. "I love you," he tells her in a rawly miserable voice. And love's never done much for him - in fact, love has, in his experience, broken down more than it's ever built - but it might do something for Lexie, this clenching feeling of shared sorrow for the death of a man he didn't even like that he has lodged underneath his aorta.

Lexie doesn't immediately reply, then she turns her face to press it into the space where his neck becomes his shoulder. Her skin is almost fever-hot and sticky with drying tears, but "I know" breathes along his own cooler flesh. Now Mark's a surgeon. He knows pain doesn't get fixed with words. And yet it feels like...it feels like healing. It feels like the breathless moment of relief just after you're sure the body's accepted the donor organ.

Mark isn't used to the idea that he can make people stronger just by being there for them, but if this is what it's like, if this is what love can do for people...well, there's not a burning bridge in sight. Just his and Lexie's, twinned, meeting in the middle.

And O'Malley's, of course, deep under river water now. Maybe not burned, but gone all the same.

 

 

Not since New York and that closed circle of Mark-Derek-Addison has he ever talked this much to anyone. About everything and nothing. The foundations are there and now they're building struts and braces and sturdy, load-bearing structures. Lexie asked him to teach her, and yet he's the one learning, _growing_.

_'Oh God'_ , he thinks into the familiar darkness of their room in their apartment, _'this is what being an adult is like'_. The thought ought to fill him with the ball-clenching horror and yet, and yet--.

He always thought relationships, the very concept of them, were about compromise. Stifling each other. Limitations. And yet, with Lexie, there's growth, so much growth, a hundred different horizons to chase and so adulthood?

Not that hard.

 

 

Adulthood is hard. Adulthood is _horrible_. Adulthood is doing the right thing - _actually_ the right thing, and because he wants to look after his grandkid, not just because he thinks he ought to - and still getting punished for it.

In the end, there's no grandkid for him to hold, no Lexie for him to have and he could have spiralled. He could have spiralled so easily.

And yet he looks Teddy Altman in the face and asks her to have lunch - in _daylight_ \- with him. So maybe it's not just who he's with that defines whether Mark has a chance of being a good man or not. Maybe that choice has always landed squarely on his shoulders and he's just been making excuses until now. And that...that's a kind of reassuring fucking revelation.

 

 

(So, okay, he sleeps with Reed. But revelations don't go away that easy. Or at least he sincerely hopes not.)

 

 

Love, Mark thinks, is about making things better. Not worse. So it shouldn't have been like him and Addison, dragging a marriage down just to try and make something new. And it shouldn't have been about asking Lexie to make herself less so that he himself could make up for his own mistakes, for not having been there for Little Sloan.

Love should be construction and growth. Love should be genesis. Love _is_ Sofia and what he and Callie and Arizona are starting to build for themselves, even if it took them a while to find places to meet in the middle.

Love is wanting so very much for Lexie to be happy that Mark actually moves on and lets go.

Love is, basically, trying. And Mark can't believe it's taken him this long to clue into that.

 

 

Mark changes his mind about love somewhere in the woods between Seattle and Boise.

He changes his mind because he holds Lexie's hand and he talks about destiny and about love and about 'meant to be' and _means it._

He changes his mind because love was meant to fix things, to make them better, and there's this look in Lexie's eyes as the light goes out of them that says she sees that life too, the one they could have had.

He changes his mind because she dies anyway, and knowing he loves her and she him doesn't make things better. It doesn't fix things. It just ruins them instead.

 

 

Mark dies knowing he built one last bridge - _the_ most important one - rather than burning it before he went.

(He doesn't know if that's any comfort or not.)


End file.
